Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday July 31, 2012 @12:21PM
from the tastes-like-chicken dept.

ananyo writes "Digestible microchips embedded in drugs may soon tell doctors whether a patient is taking their medications as prescribed. The 'digital pills' are the first ingestible devices approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pills contain a sand-particle sized sensor, consisting of a minute silicon chip containing trace amounts of magnesium and copper. When swallowed, it generates a slight voltage in response to digestive juices, which conveys a signal to the surface of a person's skin where a patch then relays the information to a mobile phone belonging to a healthcare-provider. Currently, the FDA, and the analogous regulatory agency in Europe have only approved the device based on studies showing its safety and efficacy when implanted in placebo pills. But Proteus Digital Health, the manufacturer, hopes to have the device approved within other drugs in the near future."

“About half of all people don’t take medications like they’re supposed to,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla,California. “This device could be a solution to that problem, so that doctors can know when to rev up a patient’s medication adherence.”

You know, I kind of like the idea of deciding for myself what medication I take and when. The idea of my doctor trying to make me ingest a sensor like I'm some sort of medical prisoner is more than a little creepy to me. What's next, is he going to give me forced ball-shock treatments if I refuse to eat healthy?

The issue is that a doctor cant treat you if you dont take your meds and patients often dont know if they have or not due to mental condition or as part of drugs side effects. This can be a major issue when you cant remember if you took the yellow pill today or not and taking another could kill you while skipping a day could cause a relapse of your condition.
If on the other hand you dont want your doctor to treat you (as you indicate), then simply dont go to one.

You know, I kind of like the idea of deciding for myself what medication I take and when. The idea of my doctor trying to make me ingest a sensor like I'm some sort of medical prisoner is more than a little creepy to me. What's next, is he going to give me forced ball-shock treatments if I refuse to eat healthy?

You are exactly the reason we need devices like this. Either take the medication as prescribed OR don't take any medication. But stop selectively breeding resistant bacteria that impact EVERYONE else.

Yeah, vets have absolutely nothing to do with bacterial resistance. I mean, those chickens need to be treated with vancomycin - absolutely all of them, as a preventative measure. Surely that has much less impact on bacterial resistance than Grand-pa who forgot to complete his pills for pseudo-membranous colitis because he felt better after a day.